Givenchy aujourd'hui : où en est la maison
The spring 2024 runway closed with a black wool coat, double-breasted, nipped at the waist, worn over narrow trousers and a white shirt. Nothing remarkable, except that it looked like something Hubert de Givenchy might have cut in 1957. Which is either the point or the problem, depending on whom you ask.
Givenchy occupies an odd position in the LVMH stable. It is not Dior, which prints money. It is not Celine, which has a clear, polarising vision under Hedi Slimane. It is a house with an extraordinary past, a famous logo, and a present that feels, at best, provisional. The question is not whether Givenchy matters — it does, historically — but whether it matters now, and to whom.
The house Hubert built
Hubert de Givenchy opened his atelier in 1952, aged twenty-five, with eight million francs borrowed from friends. He had worked under Schiaparelli and learned construction at the feet of Cristóbal Balenciaga, whom he revered and whose advice he followed until Balenciaga's death in 1972. The first collection, shown in February 1952, featured separates — blouses you could buy off the rack, skirts that didn't require three fittings. This was not couture as Paris understood it, and the press was confused. American buyers were not. Givenchy's "separates" concept sold immediately.
What followed was forty-three years of unbroken elegance. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, in Sabrina, in life. Jacqueline Kennedy at the funeral. The Bettina blouse. A way of dressing that assumed you had taste, money, and no need to prove either. Givenchy retired in 1995, selling the house to LVMH. He lived another twenty-three years, long enough to see what happened next.
The designer carousel
Since 1995, Givenchy has cycled through seven creative directors. John Galliano lasted eight months. Alexander McQueen had five seasons and produced some of his most unsettling work — the metal spine corset, the kimono coats, collections that treated Givenchy's codes like autopsy subjects. Julien Macdonald followed and is best forgotten. Riccardo Tisci arrived in 2005 and stayed twelve years, the longest tenure since the founder. He turned Givenchy dark, gothic, saleable. The Antigona bag launched in 2010 and became the house's cash engine. Rottweiler T-shirts sold to a clientele that had never heard of Bettina Graziani. Tisci left for Burberry in 2017, and the house has been searching for equilibrium ever since.
Clare Waight Keller took over womenswear and menswear in 2017. She designed Meghan Markle's wedding dress, which was seen by two billion people and somehow managed to be both historic and entirely forgettable. Waight Keller's Givenchy was polite, competent, commercially unsuccessful. She departed in 2020. Matthew Williams, founder of 1017 ALYX 9SM and a veteran of Kanye West's design studio, was announced as her replacement in June of that year.
The Williams era
Williams arrived with a specific brief: make Givenchy relevant to a younger, streetwear-literate customer without alienating the women who buy Antigona bags. He brought hardware — literal hardware, the buckles and chain closures he had developed for ALYX. He brought collaborations: with Chito, the Filipino illustrator; with Disney, inexplicably. He brought a version of elegance that involved cut-out jersey bodysuits, chainmail, and a recurring motif he called the "4G" lock.
The first collections were met with the kind of reception reserved for a decent first draft. Technically accomplished, occasionally striking, not quite sure what they were arguing for. The spring 2022 men's show, held in a brutalist Paris car park, featured good coats and a lot of hardware that looked like it belonged on a motorcycle jacket. The autumn 2022 women's collection leaned harder into old Givenchy codes — there were references to Hubert's 1968 "Sculpture" collection, to the clean tailoring of the Seventies. It looked more confident. It also looked like it was trying to please two audiences at once.
Sales have been uneven. LVMH does not break out Givenchy's revenue separately, but analysts estimate it generates between €700 million and €900 million annually, roughly a tenth of Dior's haul. The Antigona remains the bestseller. Newer bags — the Cut-Out, the G-Hobo — have not achieved the same traction. Ready-to-wear sells, but not at the velocity LVMH would prefer. In the brand's favour: a strong fragrance business, anchored by L'Interdit, which has been a consistent performer since its 2018 relaunch.
Where the house stands
Givenchy's difficulty is structural. It is a couture house that no longer operates a couture atelier. It is a French maison whose current aesthetic codes are American streetwear and Italian hardware. It has a founder whose vision was so specific, so tied to a particular kind of mid-century chic, that every subsequent designer has either ignored him or been crushed by his ghost.
The most successful post-Hubert era was Tisci's, precisely because he did not try to recreate what Givenchy had been. He made something else — darker, stranger, more baroque — and called it Givenchy because that was the name on the door. Williams has not yet found that level of conviction. His Givenchy feels like a negotiation between what he wants to make and what the house's heritage allows. The result is clothing that works on the body, sells in certain markets, and does not quite cohere into a vision you could describe in a sentence.
The competition has clarified. Bottega Veneta under Matthieu Blazy is operating at a level of craft and conceptual sharpness that makes most of the industry look lazy. Chemena Kamali has revived Chloé by doing one thing very well. Slimane's Celine is Slimane's Celine, which is at least a clear proposition. Givenchy is still working out what it wants to say.
There are moments, though. The black coat that closed spring 2024. A grey worsted suit from the autumn 2023 men's show, cut with a high gorge and a soft shoulder, that would not have looked out of place in Hubert's 1985 retrospective. A leather trench from pre-fall 2023 that understood how a sleeve should hang. These are not accidents. They suggest a designer who knows how to cut cloth, who understands the archive, and who may yet find a way to make those things speak to the present.
Whether LVMH will give him the time is another question. The group is patient with houses that have momentum. It is less patient with houses that feel like they are still searching. Givenchy has the name, the history, the infrastructure. What it needs is a reason for existing that is not just "because we have always existed." That is the work. The coat was a start.
